The BP Broadside: What the Heck is an RBI Whore?

Since baseball is an individual game wrapped in a team concept, selfishness by Beltran and Reyes actually could be a good thing. I heard that with Wright and Ike Davis out of the lineup and Jason Bay still in freefall, Terry Collins actually went to Beltran recently and told the switch-hitter to get greedy in RBI situations. The Mets manager liberated Beltran to essentially become an RBI whore.

As Craig Calcaterra suggested, the whole concept of the “RBI whore” is questionable, because when is a player trying not to drive in a run in an RBI situation? This is not “Bartleby, the Ballplayer”—no hitter, confronted with ducks on the pond, says, “I would prefer not to.” The only possibility I can think of is that Collins is suggesting that Beltran expand his strike zone with runners on, hack away instead of taking close pitches and working a walk. This hasn’t been a big issue for Beltran so far—he’s taken all of eight walks in 53 PAs with runners in scoring position, leaving him swinging away 85 percent of the time. Still, it’s possible that Collins is gripped by the same questionable thinking that confronted Ted Williams back in his day, that a walk taken with runners in scoring position was a wasted opportunity.

This kind of logic would seem to avoid a great deal of complexity in both batter mindset, the idea that more baserunners equal more runs, and so on. In any case, a great deal of the potential for whoredom is out of the hands of the batter. You can’t be an “RBI whore” unless your team propositions you. Driving in runs is a matter of opportunity. Solo home runs aside, no hitter, be he Babe Ruth or Rey Ordonez, can plate a runner who isn’t on base.

As longtime readers know, at Baseball Prospectus we have an RBI opportunities report which keeps track of how often the whores have been given cash offers. Looking at the numbers over the course of years, some obvious limits on the amount of whoring become apparent. Given 400 or more plate appearances, the average whore—er, hitter—drives in about 14 percent of the runners on base when he comes to the plate. In the period of time contained in our database, 1950 to present, no whorish hitter has driven in as many as 30 percent of his baserunners, and in fact they haven’t quite gotten to 27 percent. In the table below, “OBI” stands for “Others Batted In,” which is to say that RBIs on solo home runs are excluded.

Jensen drove in a league-leading 116 runs in 1955—90 of his baserunners, plus 26 RBIs on home runs. All else being equal, a hitter like Andres Galaragga in 1996, who saw 171 fewer runners, would have had 193 RBIs and banished Hack Wilson from the record books.

Beltran is going to have to get to work if he wants to satisfy Collins’ lusts. So far this year, he’s driven in 15.1 percent of his baserunners. He’s had 126 potential customers, the most on the Mets, but an insignificant amount league-wide, ranking 46th overall. The top ten runs from Torii Hunter with 165 (12.7 percent so far) to Kevin Youkilis (146, 16.4). Given the historical range of RBI production, Beltran could be doing a little more with what he’s been given, but not a lot more. As for his production with men on, .271/.351/.576, that’s not something to complain about.

Note that there is some correlation between those players who, both in 2011 and all time, have the greatest lust for RBIs and a certain tendency towards contact hitting and impatience. Still, that is not to say that this should be celebrated. First, a walk in no way diminishes a team’s offensive potential in an inning, it only enhances it. Hackers may drive in more runs, but their teams score fewer runs over all.

So, we’re back to the beginning. Carlos Beltran can’t be an RBI slut, he can only be Carlos Beltran. Were he to expand his strike zone, he would only diminish his value to the team, and in any case, he needs more than 126 baserunners to really throw his morals out the window. Or, to put this another way, Terry Collins is just not a good manager.

It has no discussion of Jorge Posada taking himself out of the Yankee lineup, but Nick Yablon's Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 includes an excellent discussion of Bartleby the Scrivener as it related to emerging class divisions in 19th-century New York City. Worth a read (if you prefer to).

Melville's best. One of his few stories where his narration doesn't get in it's own way, also excluding Typee. Though, he gets in his own way a lot in Billy Budd and that's probably his second best story. Go baseball!

"no hitter, confronted with ducks on the pond, says, â€œI would prefer not to.â€"
I have quibbles, Steven, mainly because I think you've been a bit hearty in this phrasing -- as you discuss for the rest of the piece, the point isn't a hitter saying "Eh, that guy on second can stay there, whatever," it's the hitter saying "I'd prefer to take the close pitch for a walk than try to hit it for a single or a possible out." Then there's also the "I'd prefer to focus on hitting the ball the other way at all costs rather than try to drive something so at least the runner gets to third." We've all been maddened by players on our favorite teams taking this approach, I'm sure.
Further, there ARE Bartlebys walking the earth, players who, without call from the dugout, lay down a sacrifice bunt with a man on second and no out. I call this the Daric Barton Special, but Derek Jeter may have a patent pending.
On the less quibbly end of the things, while I understand that this piece isn't meant to be a full study, I'm troubled by the flat conclusion at the end: "Were he to expand his strike zone, he would only diminish his value to the team". Has that really been established?
Sure, we can click over to the RE tables helpfully provided on the stat pages and see that 12-/2 is better than -2-/2, but I'm not sure that resorting to full-universe averages is the best way to evaluate questions like this. If the only thing we know about the state of the world is that Carlos Beltran has a man on second, then we'd be happy to have him take his walk.
But what we also know is what sort of skills Beltran and the players around him have. Instead of saying "the Mets' RE goes up .13 when he walks with a runner on second and two outs, so he should be willing to take a walk," I want to figure in that Dan Murphy, Fernando Martinez and the now-feeble Jason Bay hit behind Beltran and ask whether their odds of making an out are so high that Beltran ought to trade off a higher Out Percentage to gain a higher RBI Percentage.
Some of that is a scouting/coaching question, in terms of whether Beltran has the ability to lower his selectivity in certain situations (or even to dynamically change his selectivity from state to state) without throwing off his entire game, simply making outs on all those borderline pitches he swings at, etc. etc. But I think there is an equilibrium point we could estimate from the outside that balances additional hits, additional outs, and the contributions of Beltran's teammates.
Maybe in my perfect-world analysis, all of this stuff shows that the difference between the possibilities of the Mets' particular situation and the RE tables is some epsilon. My real point is that I think we're still far enough into the interior of the Land of Maybes that calling Terry Collins a bad manager isn't justified.

Oh, one other point. The league average OBP-AVG right now is .069. The weighted average of the top-ten RBI sluts from that table is .065. That's not a perfect measure of hackery, but it's what we have in this piece. It doesn't seem a particularly aggressive group.

"Be an RBI whore" could mean simply, "We've got a runner in scoring position. Don't just try to survive at the plate. If he throws you anything you can get a good swing on, hit the damn ball."
The pitcher usually dictates the options. With a man on second and first base open, the pitcher is often going to be cautious. He'd rather walk a top hitter than give him anything good to hit.
If it's not an intentional BB, however, an RBI whore (with his coach's encouragement) is going to try to get a swing at a pitch near the plate. He won't be simply content with a BB.